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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2398 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

I suppose the system could provide sentencing comparisons between the judges and magistrates for various offences. That may well help the sentencing debate. I recall my predecessor calling in September of last year for a sentencing debate. That is something that a lot of people in our community would like to have. I think that, if done sensibly, we would get a lot of benefit out of that. The system may well be of some use in terms of showing the time various courts spend on things, but I would add one word of caution there.

Harking back to my own experience, I would often turn up and find that a list has collapsed. You might have eight or 10 matters set down for a day, being due to take up eight to 10 hours of a 51/2-hour court day, and find the list collapsing. If it is a criminal list and everyone pleads guilty or people on bail do not turn up, you could end up with 11/2 hours of work. If it is a civil list, everyone could settle on the doorstep. You cannot predict those things. Those things are beyond the ability of anyone, especially the judicial officer, be it a magistrate or a judge, to predict and that can affect actual sitting times. There are a few issues in relation to both of those things, but the suggestion by the committee is a useful one which the government will be looking at very seriously with a view to doing something about it.

I turn to substance abuse problems. A lot of what was said about that is very true. We have lots of other areas in this budget where the government is trying to do things in relation to that. I am not going to go over them, Mr Speaker; they are in other portfolios. I would point out, however, that even when we did not have heroin epidemics we still had lots of criminals in this city who would commit crimes just for the sake of committing crimes and they have to be dealt with it. They are not always due to substance abuse problems.

Outsourcing legal work has been a perennial issue for about 20 years. I am happy to have a further look at it. It is always a question of what you can do in-house and where your areas of expertise are, and the ACT is not a big territory. There are some very good reasons why we outsource. Quite often it is because we simply do not have the expertise within government to do the work.

I have already dealt with the high level of property crime in terms of speaking about the task forces and giving additional powers to the police to assist them to do their job without having one hand tied behind their back, as well as about the provision of a new gaol and paying greater attention to sentencing matters.

Mr Stanhope mentioned indigenous people. Education is crucially important here. The improvements we are seeing in terms of indigenous education are going to assist. Whoever is education minister next time must keep them up, but it is a long-term issue. That applies to a number of disadvantaged groups in our society. If you really want to make a change in the long term, education is important, but that does not mean that you should drop your standards in terms of punishment because deterrence is crucially important. Human beings being what they are, if you do not have deterrence, people will always take advantage of you. That is just human nature. It extends to anyone, whether they be the richest person or the poorest person in the world.

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